Drawing Canyon: Sfumato presences in drawing and landscape

Drawings are fields of multiple, hovering presences. A rapidly sketched line in an architectural drawing, of say, a landscape, describes its form but can also record its presence, evoking vastness or a dynamic material potential. Yet the sketch is itself imbued with presence; smudges, blurs and erasures record the rapid actions of pencil over paper in the draughtsperson’s pursuit of an architectural idea. The blurs of graphite are evidence of hand and mind moving over paper and, at the same time, massive atmospheric potentials of rock, mud and sea. In this way, the sketched mark continually hovers between being a smudge of graphite and an immense landscape, the presences in both inflecting one another as if sfumato lights and darks in a painting. This paper reports on Canyon, an experimental drawing project that intensifies drawing’s capacity for sfumato presences by sketching a submarine landscape using a multi-modal technique. Canyon attempts to develop an ever-emergent, nascent architecture from presences in drawing and landscape through analogue sketches, VR and soundscapes. The first stage of Canyon was exhibited at the Palazzo Bembo in the XVI Venice Biennale, 2018.